


once in silence

by kokiri



Category: GOT7
Genre: M/M, Mental Health Issues, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-30
Updated: 2015-03-30
Packaged: 2018-03-20 10:16:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3646512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kokiri/pseuds/kokiri
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>mark tries desperately to help jinyoung on his journey from spiraling to stabilizing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	once in silence

**Author's Note:**

> i'm finally posting this over here... blegh
> 
> detailed and severe mental illness talk, explicitly discussed suicide attempts/suicidal tendencies. some content may be triggering so please be careful.

Mark hated the way his ears always got stopped up when he drove through the tunnel on the way to Jinyoung’s apartment. But that wasn’t enough of a reason to avoid seeing Jinyoung altogether, he decided.  
  
There had been something weird in Jinyoung’s voice on the phone that morning, something that Mark had never heard before. It made him feel anxious. Jinyoung had the tendency to make Mark feel very, very anxious at any given time.  
  
Jinyoung’s apartment was on the side of town that was kind of grungy but mostly artsy. The “we don’t want to look as gentrified as we are” vibe of the neighborhood made Mark feel a little sick. But Jinyoung did not like Mark’s apartment. He never really could explain why. That was the thing about Jinyoung—everything was about a mood, or an ambience, and some things just didn’t sit right with him.  
  
Even when the sun was shining bright, it always seemed a little dim on this side of town. Mark sat stuck at a red light for a little too long and he mindlessly watched an old man scrubbing graffiti off of his shop window. It was some anti-establishment message, which Mark figured was probably ironic in some way considering the general population of the area, but he wasn’t the literary type and had never really gotten the hang of when irony was and was not appropriate for a situation. That was Jinyoung’s thing.  
  
The light turned green. Mark’s car lurched forward, and he felt resoundingly sorry for the old shop owner in a way he couldn’t describe.  
  
Parking was a little expensive around this area, but Mark had this bad habit of being willing to do just about anything for Jinyoung’s sake. He paid the fee without a fuss and texted Jinyoung to let him know that he was on his way up.  
  
The elevator was under maintenance, so Mark had to walk up seven flights of stairs. Once he reached Jinyoung’s floor, he could hear one of the tenants singing from her apartment. She was always singing every time Mark came by. Jinyoung said she was actress, but she never seemed to go to any auditions. Mark had never seen her before, but she sounded very pretty.  
  
“Jinyoung?”  
  
There was always a dead sort of stillness resonating from whatever space Jinyoung was occupying. His apartment had especially been so ever since Jaebum moved out—but Jinyoung seemed to be finished feeling angry and betrayed over that, so it wasn’t something they discussed much.  
  
“Mark,” Jinyoung said, opening the door only the slightest bit. “Thank you for stopping by.”  
  
“Are you going to let me in?” Mark asked.  
  
“Oh. Yes.” Jinyoung hesitantly opened the door further and allowed Mark inside. The apartment was frigid and all of the lights were off—it was hard for Mark to tell if there was something wrong or if Jinyoung was just in one of his writing dazes where he forgot to tend to his immediate surroundings. “I’m sure you’ve noticed already, but I have no heat. Or electricity.”  
  
“Jinyoung, what the fuck? What is going on? Listen, I told you, if you needed help paying your rent or anything, all you had to do was—”  
  
“I thought things would get better,” Jinyoung said. After a quiet pause, he added, “I was wrong, clearly.”  
  
He looked terrible. Mark had seen Jinyoung at his best and at his absolute worst, and this was most definitely closer to his worst. Bags under his eyes, cheeks all hollowed out, a sickly sort of pale—this was a far cry from the Jinyoung of a few months ago who’d been hopeful and bright after penning a shitty romance novel and a few political speeches here and there.  
  
“Ghostwriting is a very inconsistent and unreliable job. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise,” Jinyoung said. He was trying to smile, trying to joke in a way that would let Mark believe that things weren’t as bad as they really were. It wasn’t working.  
  
“Well,” Mark said. “Let’s think about what we can do. Can I loan you some money?”  
  
Jinyoung opened his mouth to speak but immediately clamped his lips shut tight. He ran his hands through his hair, looking languidly around the apartment. His eyes widened and he dug through his pockets for something. It was a folded, wrinkled eviction notice.  
  
“I don’t think I can afford to live here anymore. Not without a roommate.”  
  
Mark took the notice and read it over.  
  
“And I’m sick of it honestly. Listen.”  
  
They stood in silence. Mark could hear her—the girl in the other apartment, she was still singing.  
  
_Your heart filled with dark despair, knowing love would flame in you forever.  
And I’d never, never know the flame was there…_  
  
Jinyoung quietly sang along with her for a moment and laughed to himself. “It’s honestly driving me crazy. You should see her, though. She’s beautiful. I really… really want to fuck her. That’s what’s keeping me from committing to the idea of leaving. I feel like I can’t. I want to fuck her so bad, Mark. Anyway, what if Jaebum comes back and he can’t… find me… because I’m not here anymore. ”  
  
“Jinyoung,” Mark said. “You’re stressed. You’re not well. You’re being evicted and you don’t really seem to give a shit. Come live with me. It’ll be fine, I promise. Once you’re feeling better, we’ll go from there. Let’s think about calling the movers and—”  
  
“No,” Jinyoung said.  
  
“What?”  
  
“Trash everything. Trash every fucking thing.”  
  
“Jinyoung, I’m not doing that.”  
  
They compromised. Mark helped him pack up a few necessities. It was a long and tedious process, but Mark tried his hardest to be patient. Jinyoung needed patience the most in these moments.  
  
All the while, the girl kept singing. Jinyoung sang along.  
  
_And now there’s twice as much grief, twice the strain for us.  
Twice the despair, twice the pain for us, as we had known before._  
  
As Jinyoung locked the apartment behind them, Mark slid his arm around Jinyoung’s waist, but he wasn’t really sure why he felt the need to do that. He promised that tomorrow, he would take care of everything left behind that needed to be taken care of. But today, he was going to buy Jinyoung lunch and there wouldn’t be an unpleasant thought to be had.  
  
They were mostly silently as they walked down the seven flights of stairs together. Jinyoung looked like something was really weighing on his mind, which wasn’t unusual for him.  
  
“Hey,” Jinyoung said. He was stopped at the bottom of the last flight of stairs, waiting on Mark who had volunteered to carry all of Jinyoung’s things by himself. “Do you know the name of that song? That song she was singing?”  
  
“Not off the top of my head,” Mark said.  
  
“It’s probably something real obvious,” Jinyoung said. He sang, “ _Then one day we cast aside our secret longing… The raging tide we held inside would hold no more_ …”  
  
For some reason, Mark couldn’t help but blush.  
  
  
  
  
It made Mark feel relieved to see that Jinyoung had an appetite at all. Though Mark did not understand much about the life Jinyoung chose to live—but was it really a choice, he wondered?—he figured he understood the ups and downs enough. Sometimes, Jinyoung could not afford to eat. Other times, he simply did not care to.  
  
“You know, Jaebum… Jaebum’s pretty unreliable,” Jinyoung said, running his finger over the condensation developing on the side of his glass of water. “He said he would come back.”  
  
“I don’t know, maybe he was just… saying that in the moment?” Mark said. It was a light suggestion that he was at least somewhat certain Jinyoung could handle hearing. He stared into his cup of coffee and wondered if the lingering silence meant that he had upset Jinyoung.  
  
“Maybe,” Jinyoung said. He had cleared his own plate and moved onto Mark’s. “You’re paying, right?” he asked.  
  
“Of course,” Mark said.  
  
“Okay. I want coffee. No, actually tea. I’m disgusted by coffee nowadays. It makes me sick.”  
  
“I’ll order you tea.”  
  
“Anyway, Jaebum was all about making these promises he couldn’t keep. I’m so mad thinking about it. I hadn’t really thought about it in ages, honestly,” Jinyoung said. “Well. In at least a week. I think of Jaebum a lot. I wish he would still talk to me.”  
  
Mark didn’t exactly know what to say. He was thankful for the timing of their waitress, as she halted the conversation long enough to let him gather his thoughts. Once she had taken the order for Jinyoung’s tea and left, Jinyoung was staring Mark down and waiting for a response.  
  
“I mean… yeah, that is Jaebum,” Mark agreed. “Always telling people what they want to hear. But don’t we all… kind of do that?”  
  
Jinyoung nodded slowly.  
  
“Look, I know that you understand deep down. Jaebum was in a bad place. And that environment that you all live in, it’s just not—”  
  
“It’s not what?” Jinyoung asked defensively. “Honestly, I knew that it would come to this. Like, sorry we can’t all be stuffy salarymen like you are, Mark!”  
  
“I’m not—” Mark stopped himself to lower the volume of his voice. “That’s not what I am. I simply have an office job. I graduated with a useless degree and had to settle.  _You_  didn’t graduate at all.  _Your grandparents_  are paying off your student loans while you starve yourself half to death downtown. It’s not healthy, Jinyoung. It’s not okay.”  
  
Jinyoung was silent, but obviously still upset.  
  
“Jaebum needed to get out. And he did. I hope he’s doing better than he was before. I’m sure you want what’s best for Jaebum.”  
  
“I do,” Jinyoung said. He crossed his arms, sulking down into his seat as the waitress sat his tea in front of him. “Thanks,” he muttered. As she walked away, he quietly said, “I always thought what was best for Jaebum would include me in some way. But that was stupid, huh?”  
  
“Not stupid,” Mark said. “Incorrect, but not stupid.”  
  
Things suddenly felt very chilly between the two of them. Jinyoung complained that his stomach was hurting and he wanted to go home, getting childishly impatient while Mark carefully the correct tip in accordance to their bill.  
  
It was one of those moments in which Mark had to remind himself, it was just Jinyoung, and all he needed was a little patience.  
  
“I’ve always liked that about you,” Jinyoung said, bundling up under the safety of his coat and scarf before they ventured out into the cold. “Even when we were broke in college, you always tipped thirty percent. Thirty percent! It was kind of silly, but back then I always wanted you to be the better half of me.”  
  
Mark never knew what to do when Jinyoung said things like that. It was just Jinyoung—the writer in him, forever the romantic English major who believed in things like soulmates and better halves.  
  
Maybe he was jumping the gun, but Mark kind of liked that his apartment was what Jinyoung willingly regarded as home.  
  
  
  
  
Jinyoung slept.  
  
He slept for hours and hours. He slept through the afternoon, far into the evening, and didn’t stir until noon the next day. Mark gently shook him awake and asked him if he wanted breakfast.  
  
“Not today,” Jinyoung mumbled. “Feels too bad.”  
  
“What feels too bad?” Mark asked gently. He gathered the sheets that Jinyoung had kicked to the bottom of the bed and pulled them back up, straightening up the comforter and pillows and hoping that anything at all would make Jinyoung look at least a little comfortable.  
  
“Everything. Me. This.”  
  
It hurt Mark’s feelings a little bit, but he tried not to take it too seriously. He was feeling a little crotchety himself, having slept on the couch so that Jinyoung could have a good night’s sleep in the bed. There was limited space and Mark wasn’t exactly sure what they were going to do about this new living arrangement, but he wasn’t a particularly uptight guy. Sleeping on the couch for a couple of months was a small price to pay for the comfort of knowing that Jinyoung was finally resting properly.  
  
“Do you want to go downtown with me later?” Mark asked. He hesitantly walked over the window and considered pulling the blinds. “Is there anything else you want to get from your apartment?”  
  
“When?”  
  
“Whenever you’re awake,” Mark said.  
  
Jinyoung gave him a noncommittal groan and rolled over, holding his hands over his eyes. “I don’t want anything else. Just leave it there. It doesn’t matter. None of it matters,” he said. Within a few seconds, he had dozed off again.  
  
Mark wasn’t sure what to do. He felt irrationally worried and out of control even though there was nothing particularly bad going on. Jinyoung was there, he was sleeping, and he was safe. Everything was fine.  
  
But Jinyoung didn’t seem fine. Mark started worrying if maybe this was more than he really knew how to handle. He paced for a few minutes, scrolling through the number of texts he had received from Jackson that he simply hadn’t had the time or energy to respond to.  
  
_mark, are you with jinyoung?  
  
jinyoung isn’t answering his phone, have you talked to him lately?  
  
i’m really worried, last i heard from jinyoung he wasn’t able to make rent  
  
mark i need you to call me immediately. it’s about jaebum._  
  
There was a terrible sinking feeling in Mark’s gut. He crept out of the bedroom and into the living room, dialing Jackson’s number and bracing himself for bad news. Jackson answered almost immediately, and that made Mark feel a little uneasy.  
  
“What about Jaebum?” Mark asked. “Jackson, please don’t tell me what I think you’re about to tell me.”  
  
Jackson cleared his throat, his voice rough and raspy. He had been crying. It was always so easy to tell with him. “It was bad, but… he’s alive. He made it.”  
  
“Thank God,” Mark sighed, but the knot in his stomach didn’t go away. “I thought he was staying with his parents? I thought everything was okay. He… never returned my calls or anything, but I don’t know. He told me he would be safe at home. I tried texting him. Emailing him. I even dropped by his parents’ house a couple of times, but they said he wasn’t there. I thought he was just busy or something.”  
  
“I guess it’s not that simple,” Jackson said. “I guess… I never really understood. Even now, I’m having a hard time understanding. His parents want to keep things quiet and normal, whatever that means. He’s going to be staying somewhere nice for a while, that’s what they told me. They can afford it. You know, one of those residential places, with a nice garden… and pretty nurses… where they teach you how to function again after you’ve completely given up. That’s where he’s going to be.”  
  
It should have been a relief to hear, but Mark still felt cripplingly terrified. What was the success rate of these places? What did treatment like that even entail? Were they going to take from Jaebum everything that made him who he was simply as a means to make him functional, working, not broken, by whatever their standards were?  
  
“Someone has to tell Jinyoung,” Jackson said, interrupting Mark’s increasingly rapid train of thought. “Where is he, Mark?”  
  
“He’s with me. He can’t afford to live downtown by himself anymore. I don’t think he’s had any work in a few months, but who knows. He’s being really vague with me about everything. You know how he is.”  
  
“I know. But as long as he’s with you, I feel better.”  
  
“I went to his place yesterday. We packed up a few things, but he wants to leave the rest. I have no idea what’s going through his head. But I’m trying.” Mark paused. He could hear the creaking of his bedframe. “I’m gonna go now. I’ll call you later. Text me the address of where Jaebum’s staying.”  
  
“Mark, Jaebum—” Jackson stopped himself. “Never mind. I’ll text you.”  
  
Without saying anything else, Mark ended the call and tried his hardest to look composed as Jinyoung lazily dragged himself from the bedroom and into the kitchen and scoured the fridge for something.  
  
“You never were much of a drinker, were you?” Jinyoung asked.  
  
“Not really,” Mark said. “Anyway, it’s hardly past noon. That’s not a good habit to have, Jinyoung.”  
  
“You’re right,” Jinyoung said, sounding a little too resentful for Mark’s taste, and closing the fridge door. He moved slowly, like he was ready to collapse at any given moment. Mark watched him, stuck somewhere between the urge of wanting to hold his hand and wondering if he would break under even the slightest touch.  
  
A million thoughts raced through Mark’s head at once. Jaebum, Jaebum, Jaebum, Jinyoung, Jinyoung, Jinyoung, this indescribably terrible reality that two of his dearest friends seemed to be slowly succumbing to, one faster than the other.  
  
Jinyoung told him once that Mark was lucky to not have the experience necessary to really, thoroughly, understand the ups and downs of it all—the peaks and valleys, the endless mood swings, waking up some mornings and forgetting how to lift your limbs and climb out of bed. Jinyoung had a bad relationship with the concept of referring to himself as  _mentally ill_. Some days, it was too concrete and he rejected it. Other days, he felt like he wore the label like a sign around his neck and he could never get away from it.  
  
Mark’s phone buzzed with a text message from Jackson.  
  
_i’m sorry. i didn’t know how to say it. i have no idea where jaebum is.  
  
his parents are acting like this never happened  
  
they’re telling everyone he’s back in school and studying abroad for the winter semester  
  
they won’t tell me where he’s going_  
  
“Fuck,” Mark muttered under his breath.  
  
Jinyoung drew the curtains in the living room and winced at the light. If there was one part of Mark’s apartment that he actually liked, it was the windowsill that was just big enough for him to sit in so he could observe the bustling city street below.  
  
“You know,” he said, holding his hand against the window and getting a feeling of the frigid air outside, “I know something’s wrong. You’re really easy to read.”  
  
“It’s Jaebum,” Mark said quietly. “Jinyoung, he… tried to kill himself.”  
  
There was a terrible, heavy moment of silence between the two of them. Mark tried to brace himself for however Jinyoung would react. It was impossible to tell in moments like these.  
  
“Tried to kill himself,” Jinyoung repeated, slowly hugging his knees to his chest. His eyes were widened, unfocused. “Tried to kill himself. He tried to kill himself.” His words came out between increasingly frantic breaths. “Jaebum? Why didn’t… he talk to me… Mark?”  
  
The way he said Mark’s name was like nothing Mark had ever heard before. It was a whimper, a desperate plea for help. The helpless confusion in Jinyoung’s voice shattered Mark’s heart to pieces.  
  
“I don’t know,” was the only answer he could give. He cautiously took a few steps towards Jinyoung. “Jackson is filling me in the best he can.”  
  
“I want to see him,” Jinyoung said softly.  
  
“I don’t know what to tell you, Jinyoung.”  
  
“I want to  _see_  him.” It was a demand now.  
  
Quietly, gently, Mark had no choice to but to tell Jinyoung only things he did not want to hear.  
  
  
  
  
It was a work in progress, but sometimes Jinyoung ate full meals. Sometimes he could be trusted to take a small nap and not pass out for hours on end. After a week or so of their oftentimes strained and complicated cohabitation, Mark felt like he was seeing signs of improvement.  
  
Because of this, he was thoroughly blindsided when Jinyoung woke him up in the middle of the night and asked him when Jaebum’s funeral was going to be.  
  
“Jinyoung… Jaebum is alive,” Mark said, rubbing his eyes and fumbling in the cracks of the sofa for his phone so he could check the time. “I told you. Jaebum’s going somewhere good. Jaebum is safe.”  
  
“You’re lying to me.”  
  
“I’m really not lying to you, Jinyoung, why would you think that?”  
  
“Because you’re terrible at delivering bad news,” Jinyoung said, “so you lied to me. And you got Jackson to lie to me. Everyone’s lying to me because nobody thinks I can handle anything.”  
  
Mark hesitated. Jinyoung took this in the worst way he could.  
  
“I’m going out. I’m going somewhere. I have to get out of here.”  
  
“It’s one in the morning.”  
  
“I don’t care. I’ve been checking the papers, all the obituaries, just waiting. And waiting and waiting and waiting. And no one will ever tell me. Did it already happen? Everyone went to Jaebum’s funeral, didn’t they? And no one thought I would want to go.”  
  
“Jinyoung—”  
  
With shaking hands and labored breath Jinyoung searched the room for his phone and the key Mark had made for him. Mark simply watched him at first, then finally stood up to help him. Jinyoung pushed him away but he grabbed on to Mark’s shirt as he fell back and couldn’t make himself let go.  
  
“Why won’t anyone talk to me?”  
  
“I’m trying.”  
  
“Why is everyone lying to me?”  
  
“No one’s lying to you.”  
  
“You’re lying to me. I don’t want you to lie to me. Promise you won’t lie to me anymore.”  
  
Mark promised, and that promise coaxed Jinyoung back to sleep.  
  
  
  
  
The next morning, it was as if nothing had happened.  
  
Jinyoung decided to pay attention to his notebooks for the first since he had left his apartment. From where Mark was sitting, they looked like nothing more than wrinkled pages full of unintelligible scribblings, but he knew that they were more than that.  
  
They sat on the windowsill and drank tea together for breakfast.  
  
“Are you working on anything right now?” Mark asked.  
  
Though he would be embarrassed to admit it, Jinyoung always dreamed of a world where he could see his poetry and short stories published and know that the rent could be paid. He had shifted his focus on ghostwriting out of desperation and hit a lucky streak for a little while. He hated how it took his time away from his own projects, but he liked making money. It was an inconsistent line of work, though, and the inconsistency drove him crazy.  
  
“Kind of,” Jinyoung said, flipping through the newest looking notebook out of the stack. “It’s about this woman who keeps seeing this man in her house. She says he’s living under the bathroom sink and everyone in her family thinks she’s nuts.”  
  
“Yeah? Is she nuts?”  
  
“No, she’s not nuts. There’s really someone living there.”  
  
“So what happens?”  
  
“One night, the guy kills her.”  
  
“And…?”  
  
“That’s it,” Jinyoung said, sounding a bit defensive. “She dies. She was right the whole time and her family doubted her. So she’s dead now.”  
  
“I don’t really claim to know anything about literature, but isn’t that kind of unsatisfying? And… dark?”  
  
“Life is unsatisfying and dark,” Jinyoung said. He clutched his notebook to his chest as if he was afraid to let Mark anywhere near it. “Life isn’t always about rising action and falling action. Life doesn’t always have a climax or conclusion. It just happens, and it’s terrible. Writing anything otherwise is just being dishonest.”  
  
Of course, Mark could agree with Jinyoung on that. But he didn’t feel that it was particularly healthy for Jinyoung to dwell on things like that so much. Jinyoung’s therapist said that she hoped Jinyoung would utilize his writing in a therapeutic way, and maybe Mark was being was a little ignorant on these matters, but this did not strike him as being particularly therapeutic.  
  
It was always a delicate balance, knowing that he needed to make light suggestions to move Jinyoung in a direction that could help him and knowing that Jinyoung was volatile most days, moody and unable keep himself steady. Sometimes a light suggestion was enough to knock him off kilter for a week. So Mark kept his thoughts to himself for the most part.  
  
“I understand what you’re saying,” he said. “What else have you been working on? Do you… mind if I look?”  
  
Jinyoung’s expression softened, but he was still hesitant to hand over his notebooks to Mark. When he finally did, he crossed his arms and stared out the window. “I can’t watch you reading my stuff,” he said. “It’s embarrassing.”  
  
There was a story about a boy who sustained a head injury in a car accident that left him seeing dismembered, rotting hands clinging to everyone around him. A woman buried in the backyard of her home who rose from the dead to claim her husband from his new girlfriend. A family who could unzip their skin and step right out of it.  
  
Mark could trace Jinyoung’s mood in his handwriting. Some days it was neat, clear, crisp and others it was almost violent, cut deeply into the paper. He could only imagine how Jinyoung looked writing these stories, small and sick, pale and thin, and trapped in an endless battle to make people understood what everything in the world looked like to him.  
  
It made Mark want to cry.  
  
Many of the stories ended abruptly and horrifically. Pages and pages of exposition would lead up to a brief moment of absolute terror, a bloodbath, and then it was over. Perhaps the terror was what was cathartic.  
  
Perhaps the horror of it was therapeutic.  
  
“They’re good,” Mark said, returning the notebooks to Jinyoung.  
  
“Whatever, you’re just saying that. I know I should change things. Make things happier. Nobody wants to read this shit,” Jinyoung said. He paused, and then quietly added, “I just write what feels right. I write what feels honest.”  
  
“And all these people suffering so much is what feels honest to you?” Mark asked. The question wasn’t as rhetorical as his tone implied. He wanted to understand. He wanted to know what made Jinyoung see the world this way. “Is that how everything feels here?” He placed his hand over Jinyoung’s chest. “And here?” He moved his hand to Jinyoung’s head, resisting the urge to thread his fingers through Jinyoung’s hair. He wanted to give Jinyoung something, anything, even just one touch that would tell him  _I’m on your team. You don’t have to feel ashamed. You can be honest with me_.  
  
Jinyoung nodded. “It’s rotten,” he said. “And it hurts.”  
  
  
  
  
It was Jinyoung who kissed Mark first.  
  
On the way back from the therapist’s office, stuck at a red light, when Mark was least expecting it. He loved it.  
  
“She always says there’s hope for me. She says she’s never met a patient she didn’t thoroughly believe in. But I don’t feel that way,” Jinyoung said, sinking back into the passenger’s seat as if the kiss never happened. Still, he brushed his fingers over his lips. “Do you believe in me?” he asked.  
  
“I do,” Mark said, and he meant it. “I’ll always believe in you. I know how hard it is for you, but you’re always trying your best.”  
  
“I guess I’ve been feeling a little hopeless, ever since Jaebum—” Jinyoung stopped himself. He leaned over and kissed Mark again. “I always wanted to do that when we were in college. Whenever you’d make sure I got home safely from parties, I loved you. I loved you, I really loved you, Mark.”  
  
“What about now?” Mark asked. He tightened his grip around the steering wheel.  
  
“I don’t know,” Jinyoung sighed. “I don’t know anything anymore.”  
  
The light turned green.  
  
  
  
  
It was Mark who could not deny that all he wanted most days was Jinyoung underneath him, unraveling, incoherent, an absolute mess.  
  
  
  
  
In between the dizziness and the vomiting, Jinyoung said that this medication made him feel like a zombie and he hated it. He felt nothing but a strange heaviness, his brain sending out lazy signals that were very clearly saying that there was no point in anything anymore.  
  
Mark scolded himself for not being more observant. He didn’t really notice the extent of it until he came home from work one day and saw Jinyoung sitting in the same spot he had left him in, staring blankly into the cup of tea Mark had handed to him right before bolting out the door. The tea was cold now. He had not moved all day.  
  
“What does it mean?” Jinyoung asked. His voice was dull and lifeless. “What does it mean when you just forget… how to do anything at all?”  
  
“It means that we keep trying,” Mark said, helping Jinyoung to his feet and walking him slowly into the bedroom. “It means we go back to the therapist. It means we try different medication. We keep fighting, Jinyoung.”  
  
“We?”  
  
“We. The two of us. Me and you.”  
  
“Me… and you.”  
  
  
  
  
Every now and again, it resurfaced. Jinyoung’s unwavering paranoia that he was being lied to and that Jaebum was dead. He resented Mark for not telling him where Jaebum’s family had laid him to rest. He sobbed and begged to be taken there. He would do anything, he said, if Mark would just take him there for a few minutes. He cried and screamed until his throat was raw. He wanted Jaebum.  
  
Jaebum was the only person who ever really understood him.  
  
He loved Jaebum. Why couldn’t he see Jaebum? Why did Jaebum have to go?  
  
Mark ran himself in circles trying to keep up with Jinyoung’s erratic thought process. He tried to touch Jinyoung, only to be shoved away. Jinyoung was nearly inconsolable in these moments. His face was red and stained with tears, eyes swollen, hands shaking.  
  
“I know you and Jackson are hiding things from me. You’re a terrible liar, Mark, you’ve always been a terrible liar!”  
  
“Jinyoung, I promised—and you believed me, you believed me when I said I would never lie to you. Why can’t you just trust me?”  
  
“Because if Jaebum was alive, he would be here, he told me he’d never leave, he promised he would never leave me!”  
  
“He was sick! He was sick and he couldn’t help it, why don’t you understand?”  
  
“Stop,” Jinyoung said, pulling mindlessly at his hair, “lying to me! You promised me! You—and Jackson—and everyone—my parents—thought—I was fucking crazy! You think I’m insane, you think I’m not going to be able to make it. So you lie to me! Everyone is lying to me. Everyone is trying to hurt me. I’m not safe. I’m not safe anywhere! You  _told_  me I would be safe here!”  
  
Mark grabbed Jinyoung by the wrists and pulled his hands down by his side. “Stop hurting yourself! You are safe here! Please just listen to me and understand I’m trying to help you! Please, Jinyoung,” he pleaded. “Everything is for you. Everything I do is for you. I’m not trying to hurt you.” He was crying now, though he had tried so hard not to. It didn’t feel as if it was coming from a place of sorrow—more like fear. Fear that he was doing everything all wrong. Fear that he was going to lose Jinyoung the way they had almost lost Jaebum—and in a way, he was lost to them still.  
  
The tension of Jinyoung’s body loosened slightly. He cupped Mark’s face in his hands and wiped his tears away, roughly and sloppily pressing his thumbs against Mark’s skin. “Why can’t I believe anything you say? What is it,” he said through gritted teeth, “that keeps me from believing in anything around me? You’ve never hurt me before.”  
  
“I’ll never hurt you.”  
  
“So why am I so scared that you’ll hurt me?”  
  
Mark didn’t know how to answer that. He was cautious, frightened almost, as he put his arms around Jinyoung and simply held him there. They stayed like that in complete silence for what felt like hours. Jinyoung breathed into the crook of Mark’s neck, clung to the fabric of Mark’s shirt, and finally asked the same questions he always asked when he was winding down.  
  
What happened to Jaebum?  
  
One day, Jaebum took a razor to his wrists. His parents found him bleeding him in the kitchen when they got home from the grocery store.  
  
Where did Jaebum go?  
  
Somewhere safe. Somewhere good. Somewhere with people that were going to help him.  
  
Would they ever see Jaebum again?  
  
Of course they would. Jaebum would come home, better than ever before. Jaebum would be smiling.  
  
Someone once told Jinyoung that even when a person fails the first time, they always end up finding the way. What if Jaebum found a way? Jaebum, who was far away; Jaebum, who was breathing; Jaebum, who was alive. It could all be over one day.  
  
“Don’t think about it like that,” Mark said.  
  
It was hard not to.  
  
  
  
  
There were good days. Good days meant getting out of bed. Good days meant going for a walk through the park. Good days meant having lunch together. Mark loved Jinyoung on good days.  
  
Then there were bad days. Bad days meant prying a knife out of Jinyoung’s hands. Bad days meant pushing pills through his lethargic lips. Bad days meant not being able to leave him alone for a second. Mark loved Jinyoung on bad days.  
  
And in between, there were days that were neither good nor bad. They just were. Jinyoung would feel like he wanted to eat something, but would vomit from anxiety later. The two of them would share a memory, something funny that Jaebum did a couple of years ago when he was bright and vibrant. Jinyoung would cry so hard his body shook and ached.  
  
Mark felt hopelessly, annoyingly idealistic every day. He believed that the good days could become bigger and stronger than the bad days. Jinyoung always looked at him like he was absolutely foolish when he said this, but sometimes he would smile.  
  
“I’m coded this way,” Jinyoung said.  
  
“That doesn’t mean we don’t keep trying,” Mark said.  
  
“What gets me the most,” Jinyoung said, throwing his legs over Mark’s lap as they lazily looked for something to watch on TV, “is rationalizing feeling bad for no reason. I guess you could say that the reason I feel bad is just because… I feel bad, and that in itself is a reason. There’s an imbalance, and that’s the reason. But for some reason my brain doesn’t want to accept that.”  
  
Mark absentmindedly rubbed the jutting bone of Jinyoung’s ankle. Jinyoung was too skinny lately, there was too much of him sticking out in a way that looked like it hurt. But Mark loved every inch of him all the same. “What have you been talking about lately with your therapist?” he asked, gauging the mood and figuring that Jinyoung seemed calm enough, and actually willing, to share what usually made him feel so ashamed.  
  
“My parents,” Jinyoung answered simply.  
  
“Yeah? You don’t talk about them much.”  
  
“In some ways, there’s not much to talk about. But of course, to my therapist, that lack of content is indicative of some larger problem. They weren’t there enough. They weren’t emotionally available to me. And then they went off and died in a car crash when I was nineteen. Isn’t that sad? Isn’t that just so typical and boring,” Jinyoung said. Mark hated that bitter tone in his voice so much.  
  
“It’s something that hurt you. It’s not a matter of typical or boring.”  
  
“When my parents died, my financial aid got all fucked up because they could no longer pay for my shit. I went on the work study program. I started getting really overwhelmed because I didn’t know how to balance it with school. That’s when I started fucking everything up. Flunking everything. Going to class drunk. All that stupid shit I pulled. Sometimes I feel guilty because… I spend more time being hung up on that than being upset about my parents dying in the first place.”  
  
Jinyoung spoke as if the words were ripping his throat to shreds as he spoke them. It was something deep and shameful within him that he hated. He looked at Mark, terrified and desperate for approval.  
  
“It’s probably easier to focus on that than to dig up all the shit about your parents,” Mark said after a heavy pause.  
  
“I feel like I’m not allowed to feel upset about anything. But look at me… That’s all I do. I feel upset about things. I’m crazy from just how god damn upset everything makes me.”  
  
“It isn’t like that at all,” Mark said gently. He was too aware of his skin on Jinyoung’s skin at that moment. He wished it could be more. He wished it could be that simple. And he was selfish for caring so much about such things.  
  
“It sure does feel that way. It’s really hard, honestly… to remember what it was like before I was this way.”  
  
“Well, you always struck me as a little moody from the very first time I met you,” Mark admitted. He laughed when Jinyoung very lightly kicked him. “I’m not trying to tease you! I mean, am I wrong?”  
  
“No, you’re not wrong but that’s definitely not the first impression I wanted you to have of me at the time!” Jinyoung laughed. It was a beautiful sound, one that Mark hadn’t heard in what felt like an eternity. “Anyway, Jaebum always used to say the same exact thing. He always told me I was too mopey. Remember that semester we lived together in the dorms? He absolutely could not stand me.”  
  
“And yet you two ended up living together after you dropped out.”  
  
“That was out of necessity,” Jinyoung insisted. His smile faded as he continued. “And… I really trusted Jaebum to take care of me. I probably put a lot of pressure on him. I should have been taking care of him instead of burdening him. Maybe I could have—”  
  
“Things aren’t always that simple. You’ve always needed a little push, Jinyoung, but it doesn’t make you a burden. You’ve had such a hard time after your parents… I hate to see you talking about yourself as if you’re just dead weight or something. You’re so much more than that.”  
  
It was hard for Mark to put it in words—that Jinyoung was bigger and brighter than any terrible thought he had about himself. Jinyoung was important and special, and at the core of everything Mark loved, and at the end of everything Mark worked towards day after day. And Jinyoung was so, so beautiful.  
  
He would probably never be able to find the words to tell Jinyoung this, so he hoped that Jinyoung would somehow understand him through the gentle touch of his fingers on the bone of Jinyoung’s ankle.  
  
When Jinyoung twisted and turned and crawled up to Mark to give him one quick kiss on the cheek, Mark felt happier than he ever thought possible.  
  
  
  
  
Jinyoung liked to sing to himself. More often than not, he always found himself going back to the song that he had learned through the paper-thin walls of his old apartment. Though it had been quite some time since he had heard it, he remembered the lyrics and the melody perfectly.  
  
“ _I loved you once in silence, and misery was all I knew_ … Oh, that’s it, isn’t it? That’s the name of the song,” he said. “It’s such a sad thought. Nothing beats the classics in terms of pure and utter melodrama, you know?  _I loved you once in silence_...”  
  
And Mark loved Jinyoung in painful, excruciating silence.  
  
  
  
  
“Not better,” Jinyoung said. “Just… stabilized.”  
  
“That’s progress,” Mark said. “Don’t diminish your progress just because it’s not perfect.”  
  
Sometimes a string of good days would turn into a good week. A good week punctuated by one bad day did not feel like the end of the world. The new medication made Jinyoung tired and Mark learned to work around his unpredictable sleeping schedule.  
  
Jinyoung started writing again rather than mindlessly flipping through his notebooks and ruminating on the terrible thoughts that inspired his old stories. One day he ripped out a couple of pages and threw them on the floor. In the fury of his newfound inspiration, he didn’t even notice Mark pick them up.  
  
They were the last couple of pages from his story about the woman and the man under sink.  
  
That night as Jinyoung slept, fallen asleep among a mess of papers and pens, Mark gently pulled the notebook out from under him. He took glance at the open pages and could see all of the changes Jinyoung had made. The man under the sink wasn’t real, but the woman spoke openly with her family who encouraged her to go therapy and told her that they loved her no matter what.  
  
Jinyoung stirred, rolling over on his back and trying to make himself comfortable. “You’re reading my shit,” he said.  
  
“Sorry,” Mark whispered. “Go back to bed.”  
  
“It’s okay if you think it’s stupid. You can tell me. I know it’s boring that way, but I needed it. Jaebum always used to tell me I only write awful shit. Something in me really wants to prove him wrong… You know, whenever he comes back home.”  
  
“It’s not boring. It’s absolutely perfect.”  
  
Jinyoung smiled, and stretched his arms over his head. “You should come to bed with me.” He spoke in soft sighs and his thin body sprawled out on the bed was too inviting for Mark to deny.  
  
In just a few minutes, Jinyoung was asleep again. He tossed and turned, but did not awaken again until morning. And in the silence of the bed, Mark loved him, and it no longer hurt.


End file.
